The Toucan Dreams is a group of passionate people who wish to express their love for animals worldwide. Though appreciation is undoubtedly a stalwart part of conserving these amazing creatures, it is not enough to preserve them for future generations. In other words, they are going extinct. That is why we created the Toucan Dreams project. It's a way to spread awareness of this issue in our school and encourage people to take action. 

Finding out exactly what we wanted was the most challenging part. However, we knew that ultimately, the best way was to remind people of the common beloved animals at risk while informing them of other lesser-known amazing creatures. As there were five heads in the group with five different visions for the project, we prevailed and ended on a plan everyone could agree to despite complications and obstacles. Ultimately, we decided to make this a competition for one sole reason. Passion. With people’s passion for animals, we can spread this infectious desire for the conservation of these incredible creatures through art. For this, we didn’t want to limit their creativity, so we were wide with our scope, allowing various types of artwork: drawings, poems, and stories.

In this endeavor, we had to contact offices to help us set up this event, as it would be a high school and middle school event. This competition proved a success as we received multiple submissions from middle and high school students, showing that our school's students understood the awareness aspect and gave up their time to draw a piece for our competition.

We first thought of cash rewards but then wanted something simple. We gave a crochet of an animal the winner drew as the prize. This crochet was handmade and added another level of creativity to the project. Toucan Dreams has been an experience we all thoroughly enjoyed as we learned how to set up events and further enhance our collaboration skills. 

Toucan Dreams, a pun for “You Can Dream,” was still a competition, meaning there could be only one winner. It wasn't the goal of our project to promote only one animal for conservation but to spread awareness of all endangered animals.  So, we created an additional part of the project—a website to host not only all the artwork submitted but also to provide further information about the animals depicted in the art. The website acts like a gallery and, at some point, could be akin to an online museum and archive. 

The artwork submissions received were far beyond our expectations, and we were glad that this competition could serve as an outlet for the dedication and enthusiasm of participants for these lovely animals. The scope of the species submitted was limited to those known best in pop culture, but it was an area we could remedy. Though this competition was initially intended to be a one-off event, we realized that if we provided the framework to continue this project, we could raise even more attention for lesser-known species through further competitions with specific themes and animals to be drawn.